Both Death Penalty and Abortion or Neither

Great Debates
141

BTW, Curtis, five weeks is only a little bit over a month. That does not equal “baby” in my mind.

I’m against late term abortions for birth control reasons (most are done only for medical reasons anyway).
HOWEVER, until a fetus is capable of surviving outside the womb, until it is actually sentient, I do not feel that what we have here is an actual, fully human being YET. Just potential.

And to expand on what Cat Fight said, I think this is an area where a woman’s input, a woman’s experience, a woman’s feelings, are far, far more important than the abstract views of men, who will never have to go through any of this. That’s not to say that men are not entitled to express their views. But at the end of the day, it should be the woman making the decision.

You need to read up on what happened prior to Roe v. Wade, on the history of illegal abortions. Outlawing it doesn’t stop abortion – it’s only going to put more women in danger. Do some research. Don’t rely merely on emotion.
(I also wonder what the OP’s feelings are on rape and/or incest)

142

You didn’t think it through. What if “viability” was essentially “from conception on”?

That means, you can remove the developing zygote, embroy, or fetus from the uterus and gestate it in vitro at any stage.

What then? You can argue that a woman has the right to control her body. Therefore, she has the right to demand that any strange persons found wandering in her uterus can be evicted forthwith. However, the right to evict trespassers from your uterus doesn’t neccesarily give you the right to kill such a trespasser. You certainly don’t have the right to shoot somebody on your property just because they refuse to leave. You have the right to call the cops and have the cops haul the trespasser away, but not to shoot them.

And so you might have the right to demand that the fetus be removed, but what happens to the fetus afterward might not be up to you. If a man gets a woman pregnant, he has no say whether that fetus continues to develop, because it doesn’t develop in his body. And if the pregnant woman continues with the pregnancy and the baby is born, he’s responsible for 18 years of child support, regardless of whether he wants the baby or not.

So technology does change the moral equation.

Back to the debate. The problem with casting the debate in stark moral terms is that it doesn’t work that way. Even if we declare that abortion is ethically equivalent to murder, the fact is we won’t treat it like murder.

Are we really going to give women who get abortions the death penalty for Murder One? Life sentences? Of course not. So what should the punishment be? A slap on the wrist? Then abortion isn’t murder after all, it’s something else.

What’s the purpose of criminalizing abortion? To reduce the incidence of abortion? After all if criminalizing abortion saves even one innocent baby, aren’t we obligated to do it? But suppose there were other, more effective ways of reducing the incidence of abortion?

When we look out around the world, in some countries abortion is generally legal, and in other countries abortion is generally illegal. But there doesn’t seem to be a very strong corellation between legal abortion and incidence of abortion. There are plenty of countries where abortion is illegal, yet abortions happen all the time. As has been pointed out, there are lots of ways to get an abortion even if abortion is illegal–you can go out of the country, you can find a helpful provider who will perform abortions even though they are illegal, you can take certain drugs or herbs, you can shove a knitting needle through your cervix into your uterus, you can fall down a flight of stairs, and on and on. Of course, there are countries where abortion is legal and common, like Russia.

And it also turns out that there are countries like Sweden and Denmark where abortion is perfectly legal, yet is also very rare.

So. If reducing abortion is a moral obligation, aren’t we morally obligated to become more like Denmark, rather than banning abortion? Are we morally obligated to provide financial support to all pregant women, regardless of whether they are whores and sluts? Are we morally obligated to provide real sex education for kids? Are we morally obligated to provide effective birth control? Are we morally obligated to provide universal health care? Are we morally obligated to provide gender equality and a sex-positive culture? If it prevents abortion, that is?

Thing is, I’m against abortion. It sickens me. And yet, I am morally certain that criminalizing abortion is not the answer. If criminalization of abortion would work, then we could argue over it. But you know, and I know, and the American People know, that criminalizing abortion won’t reduce the amount of abortion. Other things might. So how about we try some of the things that might really work, rather than passing a law making abortion illegal and pretending our problems are solved?

143

Everyone considers the fetus human but some of us don’t consider it a person, there is a big difference.

What difference does it make if it is direct ‘murder’ or not?

144

And thus begins (or resumes) the interminable definition debate over what is a “person”, “human”, “baby”, etc. Concentrating solely on women’s rights makes the process so much easier.

145

You know what? That’s how I’ve been trying to describe how I feel about, but couldn’t put it into words. (Mind if I use this description some other time? “Human, but not a person?”)

146

And arbitiarily ignores a large portion of the debate…

147

Arguing over definitions isn’t debate. Person A says a fetus is a person and a baby, Person B says it is neither… Nobody can prove their position in any meaningful way, so it’s a waste of time.

Meanwhile, you have repeatedly and casually ignored the women’s rights issue entirely, and I can prove the relevance by citing stats on the cycles of poverty that get reinforced when a woman is forced to have a child she cannot support.

Not that it matters, really. I support the right of a woman to terminate her pregnancy for any reason she sees fit, because all evidence suggests to me that the alternative (i.e. she doesn’t have this right) offers few benefits and creates many problems.

148

Well if you think abortion is murder then it should be main focus on the abortion debate.

149

And that just leads to an argument over the definition of “murder”, which is an identical waste of time.

Heck, I’ll casually stipulate, since I don’t care: Yes, it’s murder. It’s the worst form of murder in the history of Earth and all the planets in this universe, all the universes that came before and that shall follow. Big deal. I remain pro-choice.

I suggest you check out some older abortion threads. People who share your views were using identical arguments and getting identical responses, and they’re a lot older than you claim to be. You’re never going to find the magic bullet-point (heh) that conclusively proves abortion must be banned.

For what it’s worth, I once described the extreme and highly unlikely conditions under which I might consider supporting an abortion ban. For my trouble, I got hit with the same “woman-hater!” and “slave-monger!” rhetoric.

150

Why?

As I said above, even if abortion is criminalized, we aren’t going to treat women who have abortions as murderers. Or are we?

And even if we treat women who have abortions as murderers, we still face the tricky problem of tracking them down, arresting them, trying them, convicting them, and sentencing them.

Even if abortion gets the same penalty as first degree murder, in reality the vast majority of abortion murders will be unprosecuted because we won’t be able to get enough evidence to even bring charges against these murderers, much less convict them.

A woman travels abroad. When she returns home she is not pregnant. How do you prosecute? How did you know the woman was pregnant in the first place? Even if you knew she was pregnant when she left the country, how do you prove she got an abortion in Canada? Because Canadian abortion clinics aren’t going to hand over their medical records to US prosecutors just because there’s a law against abortion in the US.

Or, a woman purchases a drug that is known to cause abortion as a side effect. 9 months later and she hasn’t given birth. How do you prosecute this woman? What’s your evidence?

Thing is, under most murder prosecutions there’s either a dead body, or a missing person. To even start an investigation into the murder there’s got to be some reason for you to think a murder has happened in the first place. And the problem for prosecuting abortion as murder is that most women who have illegal abortions will get away with it. And you aren’t going to convince people not to have abortions just by making abortion illegal, just take a look around the world at all the countries where abortion is both illegal and commonplace.

If you could convince everyone that abortion was murder, then it would be easy to prosecute abortion as murder. But you wouldn’t need to, because nobody would have an abortion in the first place.

The other problem for the “abortion is murder” argument is that you’re never going to get a supermajority of Americans to agree. You’re going to need a Constitutional Amendment to ban abortion, even if you packed more conservatives on the Supreme Court and overturned Roe v Wade, that wouldn’t make abortion illegal, it would just make it legal to make abortion illegal. And you know and I know that while there are some states that would make abortion illegal, most states wouldn’t. And so it might be illegal to get an abortion in Alabama, but it’s never going to be illegal in New York.

And so a woman travels from Alabama to New York, and 9 months later she hasn’t given birth. What action should the authorities in Alabama take? Obviously, none. And even if they catch a woman in the act of obtaining an abortion, you know and I know and the people of Alabama know that she’s not going to be prosecuted as a murderer, she’ll be prosecuted for some other crime that’s a lot less serious, because even if the people of Alabama think abortion is murder they still won’t stand for prosecuting it like murder.

151

Count me in the category of people who remains pro-choice regardless of whether or not abortion “is murder” or otherwise immoral.

If outlawing “immoral” acts causes more problems than it solves, maybe we ought to adjust our moral compasses.

152

Sure I think I got this line or something similar from this board anyway.

Curtis as others have said what do you intend to do with all those women who have illegal abortions?

153

That’s a bit convoluted I think…

How bout 2/3’s of a person?

154

No you are a person or you are not, it’s a binary thing.

155

Why is it a binary thing? Our laws sort of treat it as a binary thing, because that’s easiest. That doesn’t mean that just because we treat it as a binary thing that it therefore must be a binary thing.

And of course, we recognize all sorts of non-binary gradations of personhood. Some people aren’t allowed to vote, some people aren’t competent to stand trial, some people aren’t allowed to make financial decisions, some people have their movements restricted, and on and on.

156

You’re confusing the issue in my opinion this isn’t a game where the aim is to get to 100% of a person by passing your driving test, getting married, having a bank account and so on. All persons are instilled with some basic rights, think declaration of human rights type of thing, everything else is at the whim of your government and your actions.

157

So why can’t a fetus be a person whose continued existence is the choice of one other specific person, if we’re going to insist on personhood yet acknowledge it has nuances?

158

I don’t think I would consider these things gradations of personhood so much as gradations of citizenship. A visitor from Italy doesn’t vote in our elections, but they are every bit a person.

159

Nah. There are plenty of people who believe that abortion is murder, but the abortion that they or their wives/girlfriends/daughters want is morally OK. The only moral abortion is my abortion.

160

People still commit murders even while we pretty much all are convinced that murder is murder.